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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2018 |
Registration ID | EMLYB001012 |
Course Title | Emily Balch Seminars-Peace, Love & Understanding |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Emily Balch Seminars |
Instructor | Mancini,Michelle M. |
Times and Days | TTh 11:25am-12:45pm
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Room Location | |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2696 The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives. Current topic description: Faced with injustice and tragedy, there are communities and individuals who commit themselves to imagining and achieving social structures and institutions based on cooperation rather than exploitation. This course will examine efforts to imagine new ways of resolving economic and political conflict ("peace"), building families and friendships ("love"), and simply seeing and gaining a knowledge of each other and the world ("understanding"). Such efforts sometimes give rise to inspiration and hope and sometimes elicit tears. They can also be funny. The materials we will read, view, and experience will include the inspirational, the heartbreaking, and the comic. Throughout the course, we will make use of the "critical, probing, thoughtful approach" common to all the Balch seminars. We also consider what it might mean to bring instead a supportive, embracing, and heartful approach to these topics. Our readings will include celebrations of protest, love stories, and speculative fiction. We'll consider issues like interracial marriage and alternatives families, communes and cooperatives, education within prisons, and more. Students will write reflective and argumentative essays and will also have the opportunity at points in the semester to engage in collaborative, creative, contemplative, or activist practice. Authors and texts will include James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Jean Merrill's The Pushcart War, and essays and excerpts by Arundhati Roy and Ursula Leguin. |
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